Apathy for the Devil (46 page)

 

You couldn’t escape this track in 1972 for love or money. Every London club DJ played it in seeming rotation until the wee small hours, by which time its sensual groove had every patron swaying and buzzing with hypnotised grins. In many respects, Steely Dan defined the seventies just as potently as David Bowie. But they did it purely on their musical talent.

 

Exile on Main St.
was received cautiously by the pop pundits when it first appeared in the late spring of ’72. But that didn’t hinder its two vinyl albums from taking up dominion on my turntable for most of the summer. Hearing ‘Ventilator Blues” deep, druggy groove always takes me back to that hot and hectic season.

 

I first heard this single over at the Stooges’ rented house in
Barons Court. Iggy used to play it a lot, nodding sagely at the sentiments being expressed in King James’s dramatic soliloquy against ‘one of the most deadly menaces in the world today’. Thirty-eight years later it still stands up as the most effective anti-hard-drug statement ever made through the medium of music.

 

Whilst writing this book I was sidetracked and saddened by news of the death of John Martyn. John was a friend of mine during the late seventies, as well as being someone I’ve always considered a supremely gifted musician. This enchanted instrumental from
Bless the Weather
is just one of many Martyn classics from a decade that never gave him the success and acclaim he deserved. Maybe now that he’s passed on, he’ll finally get that global iconic stature that so eluded him in life.

 

This loping, elegant instrumental from the Tamla Motown saxophone titan was what often used to be playing in my head when I’d promenade around London’s sleepy streets after dark.

 

Ah yes, glam rock. Well, ‘Dudes’ was the form’s very own national anthem that year, its best-written song and most inspired production. Runners-up included Bowie’s own ‘Suffragette City’, Roxy Music’s ‘Virginia Plain’ and a T.Rex B-side called ‘Raw Ramp’.

Big Star’s glorious first album and
Raw Power
were the two
records I listened to incessantly whenever I had access to a record player during my travels through America that year.

 

Still the greatest, meanest-eyed, coldest-blooded hard-rock tour de force ever summoned up in a recording studio.

 

Diehard fans may argue the point but I’ve always preferred Roxy Music’s recordings after Brian Eno was banished from their midst, specifically this epic meditation on the soul-deadening side effects of living in the ‘looking-glass world’ of seventies celebrity narcissism. Bryan Ferry is quite right when he refers to it as the best song he ever wrote.

 

This actually came out as a single in 1973 but I could have just as easily picked earlier Green releases like ‘Let’s Stay Together’. His music became so omnipresent in the early seventies - particularly in all the clubs - that you could have been forgiven at the time for not fully appreciating just how remarkable the run of singles and albums he made with genius producer, arranger and co-writer Willie Mitchell really were.

 

Bowie totally nailed the soul-suckingly decadent vibe of Hollywood circa 1973 in this underrated selection from
Aladdin Sane
.

 

This is - hands down - Beefheart’s musical magnum opus. More musically accessible and way better produced than
Trout Mask Replica
but still as weird as all hell,
Clear Spot
is the splendid sound of the Captain at full creative throttle backed by a
Magic Band at their most inspired and - yes - magical.

 

Like ‘Surf’s Up’, this is the sound of utter perfection and full-on spiritual rapture merging together in the pop-song medium. Beyond exquisite, this is holy, healing music that remains to this day criminally underappreciated.

 

This careening track from their eponymous debut album contains all the approaching-train-wreck bliss of their best live shows.

 

1973 was the year when reggae reached out beyond its previous UK ‘specialist’ fan base of Jamaican expats and home-grown skinheads and started appealing to the larger white rock and pop demographic. The Wailers’ ‘Catch a Fire’ and ‘Burning’ were crucial in spreading the weed-head gospel throughout the British Isles but this Jimmy Cliff-dominated soundtrack album was the key artefact to detonate a full-blown reggae revolution in the pre-punk UK.

 

Sly’s last recording of consequence before drugs and ego turned him into one of the biggest losers of the late twentieth century.

Alongside the Temptations’ Norman Whitfield-produced ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’, Marvin Gaye’s ’73 hit single ‘Trouble Man’ introduced the world to a new, edgier, gloomier Motown sound for the seventies. A year after the studio version had sat proudly
in the UK top ten, Gaye returned to the song for a special in-concert rendition that shredded the original courtesy of some jaw-dropping vocal gymnastics and a backing band - Gaye’s old Snakepit support crew reunited once more - that swings like the proverbial motherfucker.

 

Peebles never got to duplicate the worldwide success this sultry, lovesick single briefly brought her in 1974 but I will never forget the indelible impact this record had on taste-makers and music-lovers alike during that year.

 

This is the record that contained the dreamiest and most mind-scrambling musical explorations Can ever managed to conceive together.

 

Chrissie Hynde was a big fan of this, Parsons’s posthumous final recording, and played it over and over again throughout the last months we lived together.

 

Bryan Ferry’s second all-time masterpiece composition was too dark to be considered a plausible single choice for Roxy Music but nonetheless lit up their
Country Life
album with its cautionary ode to some drug-dependent early-seventies dandy libertine. I wonder who he was referring to.

 

If you want to know even more about what it felt like to be cast adrift and left to float uncertainly through the spiritual quagmire of the (early) seventies, this album will fill you in.

 

Womack - one of American soul music’s most talented singer/ songwriters - became a bona fide hipster cult item in 1974, with the Stones and Rod Stewart frequently praising his records to the skies and clued-in club DJs playing tracks like this until the grooves had been worn down to a static hiss.

 

Let us not be forgetting the prickly Belfast cowboy’s mighty contribution to music in the early seventies.
Moondance
and
Tupelo Honey
were also particular favourites of mine during this time frame.

 

This maudlin drug addict’s confession from Newman’s seventies high point,
Good Old Boys
, really spoke to my personal condition as the decade headed towards its midway stretch.

I first heard
Physical Graffiti
in its entirety four months or more before its March ’75 release date. Jimmy Page arranged an exclusive listening session at a London recording studio. Afterwards he asked me what I thought. I told him then that the stand-out track was ‘Kashmir’ and that it would probably go down in history as their greatest-ever recording. He seemed disappointed by this information and claimed to prefer ‘Ten Years Gone’. Thirty-five years later though I’ll bet he’s revised his opinion.

 

King David’s celebrity-bashing disco extravaganza was unavoidable in ’75. ‘Fame”s co-author John Lennon is lurking somewhere in the mix but the key contributor here - apart from Bowie himself of course - is Carlos Alomar, the Duke’s most accomplished guitar foil and riff provider.

 

The Great One’s return to sustained songwriting excellence after eight erratic years was a humongous hit worldwide in early ’75. Obliquely centred on Dylan’s recent marital conflicts,
Blood
became the perfect record for lovesick fools like me to use as a musical I Ching for the broken-hearted.

 

On this sumptuously disturbing record La Mitchell daringly ditched her old LA neighbourhood of winsome Canyon ladies and free-spirited male troubadours to move into the loveless side of town where the pimps and junkies mingled with the rich and the damned. Her singing voice went down an octave in the process but her songwriting gifts flourished like never before in the new noir setting.

 

Disco’s most euphoric-sounding single was also the high-water mark for Gamble and Huff’s prolific production factory out in Philadelphia.

 

Long before these two tracks were available on vinyl, John Cale gave me a cassette tape of studio sessions he’d produced with this oddball Boston outfit, and both ‘Roadrunner’ and ‘Picasso’
instantly stood out as dual portents of ‘things to come’.

 

The gaunt Canadian dropped the bomb twice in ’75, first by finally releasing
Tonight’s the Night
, his prophetic meditation on the role of drugs and death in evolving pop culture, and then by unleashing
Zuma
at year’s end. ‘Cortez’ was the highlight of the latter, with Young and a freshly reunited Crazy Horse down-pacing their usual prairie lope until it moved more like the sound of war canoes and their paddles slicing through calm waters in order to destroy ancient civilisations.

 

This once sorely underrated LA band were suddenly a hot ticket in ’75 - particularly in Britain, which received their first live presentations with rapturous acclaim. Doubtless influenced by this stroke of fate, their leader Lowell George went on to deliver his most soulful composition and vocal performance ever during that same year before succumbing to drug-accelerated flame-out and death at decade’s end.

 

Something about the nakedness of emotion expressed in this beautiful song-a lonely, oversensitive introvert’s simple prayer for acceptance in a more sympathetic universe - really put the spook in me when I first heard it.

 

This double-fierce, borderline-obscene, amphetamine-sharp rearrangement of an old Coasters novelty track from the fifties was always the pivotal performance in their live shows in the mid-seventies.

The sessions for this album were so drug-sated that Bowie now claims he can’t remember any of the details about recording the six tracks. That’s too bad because in my estimation it’s his most fascinating work. If you really want to unravel the mysteries lurking in this deeply strange record, read Ian MacDonald’s brilliant analysis in the chapter ‘Dark Doings’ from his 2005 book
The People’s Music
(Serpent’s Tail).

 

The late seventies found Gaye struggling to match the lofty creative standards he’d set for himself earlier in the decade. But this sublime single was another immaculate conception from Motown’s greatest-ever God-given vocal talent.

 

The Stooges had already pushed the door marked ‘punk rock’ ajar at the outset of the seventies, but this track and the group who performed it were the proverbial dynamite stick which blew that door clear off its hinges in ’76, opening wide a space in rock culture for the Sex Pistols and the Clash to rampage through.

 

This hellish live recording is in the list mainly because I was a prime mover in getting it released in the first place. It certainly had a ferocious influence on the emerging punk scene - not all of it good unfortunately. A lot of the violence that took place at London punk shows was directly caused by clueless young people trying to copy the audience mayhem of
Metallic KO
. More
macabre audio
vérité
than a conventional rock album, this record now sends an uncomfortably cold chill down my spine whenever I even think about it. Bad karma on black vinyl.